Disclaimer: Don’t set your Arduino board on fire. In fact, it is generally a wise decision to not set things on fire.

 

The last few weeks we have been prepping for a Gallery Hop showing in Lexington with other artists and game designers from Lexington. There have been some really cool works and experiments going on, which has motivated us to start playing around with hardware again and just hacking/creating for the sake of curiousity.

 

Our friend OnlySlightly is developing a very intriguing installation for the show using an old telephone. This got me thinking about my days in school playing around with Arduino boards and cheap electronics. One of the assignments we had in class was to go out and purchase clearance toys and gizmos the week after Halloween, then hack them apart. It is exciting to modify/re-purpose toys, and the realization that toy stores can be a personal repo of cool controllers and gadgets is empowering. For example, for one project I ripped apart three foot pedals from a cheap kids Karaoke machine and turned them into giant yellow plastic buttons for people to smack in a collaborative abstract art making program.

 

With a $10 gift card in my pocket I headed to Walmart to see if I could find any cheap toys I could re-purpose into a controller for my recent LD game, Peter Padder Pauleypop. I happily stumbled upon a re-release of the old Mattel LED football games, a game I had as a child. The controls had a nice arrow pad and additional buttons. The needed controls, coupled with the history and nostalgia of the toy, made it a perfect thematic and contextual fit for PPP.

 

Once home I got out my trusty multimeter and went about prodding the inner circuits of the football game to see if I could tap into the lines for input. After some time blindly fumbling about, I got a promising lead 🙂 and set about soldering some lines to the board. OnlySlightly had lent us an IPAC2 I was trying out, so I first tried tying the football game input into the IPAC2. Unfortunately, the only place I had found to pull info from the line was situated such that I could not get a reading with the IPAC2 unless I set the Input line to ground and the power to the input.

 

 

The next day I brought in my jumble of bits and bolts to the office and tried option number 2, reading with an Arduino board. I was delighted to see input being registered in the Arduino Serial Monitor by powering the Football game through the Arduino and pulling input from the buttons into the digital pins on the Arduino board.

 

Around this time Lamar stopped into the office, and while we were checking out the project he mentioned how nice it would be as a wireless controller. I agreed and remembered I had a Bluetooth Arduino I had purchased years ago in an excess student loan fever. I had always been disappointed to have never used the board, and now the perfect situation presented itself.

 

I needed a 9v battery connector to power the Arduino BT board, as it did not come with a power cord and has no USB port. After our weekly RJD meetup I frantically drove about town to find an open RadioShack. For whatever reason–my guess is gnomes–all three RadioShack stores I visited were closed before 9PM on a Tuesday?!? Bummed that I couldn’t work on the project that night, I was filling up my gas tank and looking online for any other place in Lexington that sold connectors for 9v batteries. As my gas tank filled, I stumbled upon an add for battery connectors at Lowe’s. which conveniently had a location across the street from the gas station. I had 10 minutes to finish filling up the tank, getting across the street, and finding these connectors before Lowes closed. I made a mad dash.

 

Initially everyone at Lowe’s said they did not carry the connectors. But they were very helpful and went to the computer to look up the item. We found our destination to be Aisle 16, Bay 10. We headed to our destination and found a drawer on the bottom row called Science Fair Projects. Sure enough nestled inside were the connectors I needed. Funny enough, one of the employees remarked that in the 10 years he had worked there, he never knew about those connectors or that drawer.

 

With all the pieces in place I headed for home to get started.

 

I set up shop and started planning my attack. I needed to solder lines for all of the buttons and then test that everything work. Before this though, I decided to hook up the Bluetooth Arduino, which I had never done before, and try pairing it to my laptop to get a feel for how the Arduino worked and test uploading code to it. First things first however, I needed to give it some juice, so I hooked up a 9v battery via my new connector and tightened the wires into power and ground on the Arduino. The LED lit up! The Arduino was powered! I was going to pair it but beforehand I needed to make some coffee, so I went to disconnect the battery. I was fumbling with disconnecting when I noticed a strange grey shape on the Arduino board.

“Huh…” I thought, “Never noticed that before.” As I stared, I noticed the grey shape was moving…then perspective and cognition kicked in simultaneously and I realized I was looking down on a cloud of smoke rising from the board. Shit! It was starting to glow. I frantically disconnected the power and the smoke dissipated.

 

I was bummed. I might have fried the board. Yet I have done a lot of dumb things with my other Arduino boards over the years and never managed to fry one.

“Eh” I figured, “maybe it was just dust or something, I bet the board is fine.” I looked and did not see any damage on the board itself, so I figured, hey why not plug it in again! What is the worst that could happen?

 

 

As soon as it was plugged back in it started to smoke again, really going this time. Oh shit. It was glowing again and I went to disconnect, but I was having trouble. Then I noticed the glow had turned into a flame and the board was on fire. So I panicked, which made me fumble even more with the battery connector. This led to more smoke, a bigger flame, and now a loud stream of “Oh Shit, Oh Shit” coming out of my mouth. I kept fumbling with the damn connector as I imagined the whole board erupting in flames, catching fire to all of the crap I had on the table, and then burning down my friends house. Plus, there were animals inside!

 

Alas, I disconnected. Danger averted. And I learned how to catch an Arduino on fire, and what it smells like (really bad).

 

Well, that whole experience was a bummer. Interesting, but a bummer. But I refused to give up, so I busted out my wired Arduino and decided to make it happen. After a few hours I got all of the lines soldered, coded up Arduino and Voila! Input.

 

I spent the rest of the night soldering, cutting, and hacking until I got all the lines running from inside the board through a hole in the top to the arduino I attached to the front mount. I accidently screwed through the screen, so when I trun it on the eerie red glow of a cracked screen with liquid in it shines behind the Arduino, and perhaps it is poisoning me, but ya know, I can control PPP with a Mattel Football game.

 

 

Today I got the readings into Unity for the button presses, modifying code Shea wrote for our Xbox Controller Racing Game, Deluxe Turbo Racing 360.

 

Hopefully in the next few days I can get a USB mount on my canvas, so the Mattell controller plugs directly into a canvas, with a projector behind the canvas back projecting PPP.

 

Here is to art, hacking, and kind of knowing what you are doing!